Welcome!

Welcome to the home page for the inaugural edition of the Northern California (NorCal) Database Day. This is a single-day, workshop-style event where participants from academia and industry in Northern California meet to present ideas and discuss their research and experiences. Registration for the event is free, and anyone is welcome to attend. Lunch and snacks will be provided.

The event will feature invited talks by Jennifer Widom (Stanford University), Molham Aref (LogicBlox Inc), and Sam Madden (MIT). There will also be a student poster session with prizes.

News

A list of registered attendees can be found here. Slides for the invited talks have also been posted below.

Registration and Poster Submission

Although the event is free, we ask that you register (ideally, by March 18th) so that we can order enough food for lunch.

If you want to present a poster, please submit title, authors and abstract here.

Schedule of Events

April 1, 2011

9.45 - 10.15

Registration and coffee

10.15 - 11.00

Group presentations (4 minutes per presentation)

11.00 - 12.10

Invited talk:Jennifer Widom (Stanford)Principled Research in Database Systems
A surprising fraction of database research is purely systems-driven, with little regard for well thought-out, clean foundations. We argue that developing new types of database systems is best achieved by laying solid foundations first, before any systems-building begins. We look specifically at the challenges of developing new data models and query languages that are simultaneously well-defined, understandable, sufficiently expressive, similar to existing models & languages, and implementable. Detailed examples are drawn from our own work in active databases, semistructured data, data streams, and uncertain data.

12.10 - 2.00

Lunch and poster session

2.00 - 3.10

Invited talk: Molham Aref (LogicBlox, Inc)
Datalog for Enterprise Software: from Industrial Applications to ResearchLogicBlox is a platform for the rapid development of enterprise applications in the domains of decision automation, analytics, and planning. Although the LogicBlox platform embodies several components and technology decisions (e.g., an emphasis on software-as- a-service), the key substrate and glue is an implementation of the Datalog language. All application development on the LogicBlox platform is done declaratively in Datalog: the language is used to query large data sets, but also to develop web and desktop GUIs (with the help of pre-defined libraries), to interface with solvers, statistics tools, and optimizers for complex analytics solutions, and to express the overall business logic of the application. The goal of this talk is to present both the business case for Datalog and the fruitful interaction of research and industrial applications in the LogicBlox context.

Ten Years after TinyDB
Ten years ago, Wei Hong and I built the first prototype of the system that became the basis for my PhD thesis, TinyDB (a query processor at for sensor networks, specifically the Berkeley motes). In this talk, I'll summarize how data management problems in the area of sensor networking have evolved since then. On one hand, overall interest in the area of "sensor networking" seems to waning: walking the halls of UC Berkeley today, the big offices that used to hold students working on sensor networks are now mostly vacant, and total submissions to top conference are down substantially over the past few years. On the other hand, the emergence of sensor-rich mobile phones has created a tremendous opportunity to collect and analyze vast amounts of sensor data. To that end, I'll also discuss how the research issues are or are not the same with smartdust vs smartphones, discuss the MIT database group's research in these areas, and reflect a bit on the significance of TinyDB ten years on.

4.55 - 5.00

Poster awards and closing remarks

Location, Transportation, and Parking

The workshop will be held in the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre at the Mondavi Center on the UC Davis campus. (See google-map.)

By car: Parking is available at the Mondavi Center parking lot for $6. GPS address:
9399 Old Davis Rd, Davis, CA 95616.From I-80 East (Bay Area), take the UC Davis/Mondavi Center exit (#71). Turn left onto Old Davis Rd and continue north to the parking structure entrance on the right. Davis is around 1 hour 20 mins from downtown San Francisco and 1 hour 50 mins from San Jose. From I-80 West (Sacramento), take the UC Davis/Mondavi Center exit (#71). Turn right onto Old Davis Rd and continue north to the parking structure entrance on the right.

By train: Davis has an Amtrak station; walking from the station to the Mondavi Center takes about 20 minutes. The walk suggested here passes through Davis Downtown and a part of the Davis Arboretum. Instead of walking, you can also catch a Unitrans Bus ($1 exact change) to Campus and walk from there. The A bus leaves the Amtrak station hourly at 7, 17, 37, and 47 minutes past the hour. You would go towards the Silo (South Campus), and get off at Shields Library and walk from there as described here. Realtime bus locations (for the A line) are here.

By plane: Sacramento Airport (SMF) is 25 minutes from campus by car. A taxi from the airport to campus costs around $40. Alternatively, you can use Davis Airporter ($23 per person one way, discounts for bigger groups). You would need to reserve the Airporter about 36h in advance. Driving like this is recommended in case you get a rental car.